Herd behavior

Herd behavior is the coordinated movement or action of animals in groups, emerging from interactions among individuals rather than centralized control.

Self-organization: Order arising from interactions among components without a central controller. Local interactions among animals can organize a herd’s movement without a leader directing every individual.
Social facilitation: An increase in the likelihood or intensity of a behavior when other individuals are present. The presence of group members can make an animal more likely to move or feed.
Animal migration: The recurring movement of animals between regions, often linked to seasons or life stages. Migrating animals coordinate movement across distances that exceed everyday group travel.
Murmuration: A dense, coordinated flocking display by starlings, often involving rapid changes in direction. Starling murmurations make group-wide motion visible as waves of local adjustment.
Animal aggregation: A spatial gathering of animals that does not necessarily involve coordinated behavior. Animals can cluster around resources without matching one another’s movements.
Alignment interaction: A collective-motion rule in which individuals adjust their direction to match nearby group members. Matching neighbors’ headings helps a moving herd maintain a common direction.
Neighbor distance: The spatial separation between an individual and nearby members of its group. Distance helps determine which animals influence one another’s movement and spacing.
Predator avoidance: Behaviors that reduce an animal’s risk of being detected, captured, or killed by predators. Group coordination can help animals detect threats and reduce individual capture risk.
Wildebeest migration: The seasonal movement of large numbers of wildebeest across East African ecosystems. This migration illustrates coordinated travel within vast, shifting herds.
Swarm intelligence: Collective problem-solving that emerges from interactions among decentralized agents. Herd behavior is one animal example within the broader study of decentralized collective action.

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